Paraguay is one of the top 10 largest beef exporters in the world and has the potential to double its reach over the next decade. But as demand for sustainable livestock practices increases, the country will need to overcome environmental challenges linked to raising livestock if it wants to reach its export potential.
The shy and elusive neotropical otter is widely distributed in Latin America, but it is hardly spotted. When Manuel Chávez and his team discovered that a specimen was captured by one of their river camera traps in the depths of the Sierra Tarahumara canyons, in northwestern Mexico, they were thrilled.
For thousands of years, Cambodian farmers have tilled their lands according to the rhythms of the annual monsoon. Now, as the region faces changing rainfall driven by the onset of global climate change, the Southeast nation is taking action to prepare and adapt.
The mighty Khmer Empire
The Bajo Guapi and Río Guají Afro-Colombian communities live in the Chocó Bioregion, a major biodiversity hotspot. Their collective territories thrive due to their strong cohesion and robust self-governance.
Acts of violence from encroaching outsiders, and the new economic and social dynamics that they introduce, have led to displacement, which in turn weakens ancestral practices that conserve biodiversity and sustain life in these communities.
In Morocco, conserving unique biodiversity relies on the knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities who live in direct contact with nature.
The VIPs of the plant world
Located in southern Morocco, the Imegdale territory is located in the Western High Atlas range. The oldest section of the range, the High Atlas has a wide variety of natural and cultural assets, which cohere as a unique (and uniquely important) landscape and ecosystem.
Climate-resilient banana farmers in Uganda
Stanley Rwabukye is a man dedicated to his land. His passion for farming is well reflected in the way he manages his banana plantation and tends to the few herds of cattle he owns. Like most Ugandan farmers, Rwabukye wakes up at the crack of dawn and heads to his fields where he spends the better part of his day digging, weeding and pruning. Despite his 76 years of age, he is still full of youthful vigour.
An interview with Thomas Lovejoy, Senior Fellow, United Nations Foundation; Professor, George Mason University; Brazil Institute and ECSP Advisory Board Member.
When it comes to natural resources, Madagascar is a particularly blessed country. Besides being one of the most biodiversity-rich countries – with 90 per cent of its species found nowhere else on Earth – it has lots of cropland, a good climate for agriculture, vast mineral resources, and abundant labour.
Despite this natural bounty, Madagascar has become poorer in recent decades: Nearly 80 per cent of its people live on less than $1.90 a day. Twenty per cent suffer from lack of food security and the number of hungry are expected to grow over the coming decades.
"I thought everything was in order. I exploited my natural resources just as my father did, and his father before him. I paid little attention to what was actually left in the forest," Danny James, Komareng village, Yopno-Uruwa-Som.
Sought after for subsistence-based hunting, as part of rural communities’ diets for centuries, the critically endangered tree kangaroos have been hunted almost to extinction, but now local communities and conservation groups are fighting together to save them.
Nearly 80 per cent of the air we breathe is nitrogen, a harmless inert gas. However, nitrogen also combines with other atoms to form chemical compounds—known as “reactive nitrogen” or “fixed nitrogen” (Nr)—that are essential for life on Earth but, at high concentrations, also hugely damaging to the environment.
